Schedule 2 - Asylum and Immigration Tribunal: Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provision
Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Bill
6:45 pm
Mr Humfrey Malins (Woking, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 83, in
schedule 2, page 31, line 36, leave out 'other members and'.
The schedule refers to the supervision of other members and staff of the tribunal, and the amendment would omit the reference to ''other members''. It is an important matter, as according to the Bill, some members of the tribunal will be responsible for supervising others. That is an insidious provision; that is certainly the view of a number of those who practise in the field.
Can the Minister tell us whether any other jurisdictions give one judge the authority to supervise another at the same level? What does supervision actually mean? Let us suppose that one tribunal member were to grant an adjournment. Could his supervisor, a member of the same tribunal at, I assume, the same level, instruct him to change his decision? I gather that statistics on adjournment rates are already held centrally, which my correspondent says is bad enough. Under the new regime, will the supervisor be able to give instructions about the circumstances in which an adjournment should or should not be granted? What control or influence is envisaged?
An objection can be made in principle to this part of the schedule. I am not sure that judicial independence can be properly achieved if one judge is accountable to another for the manner, form and result of any appeal. This is an unpleasant little bit of the schedule. The Minister should give serious consideration to the supervisory role of one judge over another, which never operates in the courts of which we are all aware such as the Crown court.